'Ourself Behind Ourself - concealed...': Ethereal whispers from the dark side
9
July 2001
In
one of Emily Dickinsonıs luminous, shrewd lyrics, written around l863, she
writes about confronting an uncanny alter ego; presciently, she locates this
self, not in the exterior world of ghosts and spectres, but within: inside the mind, inside the self. This inner spectre lurks far more disturbingly, she writes,
than the phantoms of church or graveyard:
One
need not be a Chamber to be Haunted
One
need not be a House
The
Brain has Corridors surpassing
Material
Place
Far
safer, through an Abbey gallop,
The
Stones aıchase
Than
Unarmed, oneıs aıself encounter
Ourself
behind Ourself, concealed
Should
startle most
The
double the self behind the self, concealed - haunts fantasy literature and
fairy tales; its spectral presence
moves eerily through several marvellous tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann and
Edgar Allan Poe, and inhabits the large and various fiction of possession, from the prodigious frenzy
of James Hoggıs novel of l824, Private
Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, to the cult classic that inspired the film Blade Runner ,Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by
Philip K. Dick. Since Hogg wrote
his extraordinary study of
religious fanaticism and derangement, figures of multiple identity, of shared and scattered
personal memories, of zombie thefts of soul and spirit, of
out-of-the-body wanderings and split existences have passed from the margins of
literature through the main doors of the canon, inspiring plots in writers as
diverse as R.L Stevenson, Lewis Carroll (not only the Alice books, but the later, neglected two-volume Sylvie and Bruno ), Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, and Ben Okri
with his abuki or spirit children protagonists.
Different
theories have been offered for the perceived disintegration of unified
personality: in May 2001, on the
radio, on the Today programme of the BBC,
a scientist attending a conference near London was interviewed; he was
putting forward the theory that transplanted organs could carry the memory of
their former dwelling place, that is,
the body of the person from whom they had been removed. He told a story about a little girl who
had received the heart of a murder victim, and had then been able to recall the circumstances of her
donorıs death, and identify the
murderer. He called this theory
cellular memoryı, and he is upholding it against the views of almost all
transplant doctors and patients, who have not reported such examples
before. That cellular memoryı can
be entertained at all and on a mainstream prime time radio programme - shows
how deeply metamorphosed our ideas
of person and self have been since the unique, individual body-soul
integrity that I was brought up to
hold, in my Catholic girlhood.
But
cellular memory is only one hypothesis, among many, and Tony Oursler has long
been fascinated by the proliferating versions of human consciousness, of its
powers and connections. Heıs not offering a solution, let alone a dogma or
orthodoxy; the effect of his muttering automata and dummies and dolls leaves
rather an eddying sense of indeterminacy, vagueness, mystery. His figures are animated, sometimes
performed by single, existing individuals. But these effigiesı his preferred
term - also act as technological
transmitter/receivers/channelers. Theyıre ventriloquised from a distance,
through instruments that beam them upı and belong to the throng of various
media that human ingenuity has devised to probe the invisible, the inaudible,
the intangible.
First
the telescope, then the microscope, revealed unimaginable universes crowded and
teeming with life in dimensions beyond the reach of the naked eye; but it
wasnıt until the invention of aural probes and wave detectors that the
invisible air itself became a seething Babel, moving to a complex interplay of
forces and signals. This is Oursler territory: beyond the spectacle and the
scopic into the hum of the impalpable powers that govern space, time and our
living presence within their constraints. From the invention of the wireless to
the development of television, the
air grew ever more crowded,
yielding up all manner of mysteries to new instruments devised to detect and inventory its
messages, which werenıt presenting as mimic or figural images, but as noise
coded in waves, in photons, in pulses.
The music of the spheres turned out to be tuned rather differently than
Pythagoras or Plato and their
successors had imagined. But these
nineteenth and twentieth century discoveries continued to be bent through the
lens of metaphysics. Tony Oursler works in this borderland, where natural and
supernatural meet; through his curiosity about and long-acquired knowledge of
such endeavours in this field, he
has developed a profound, original and imaginative relationship to them.
As his Time Line reveals, mesmeric theories were woven into concepts of electricity; similarly, the discovery of of X-rays, facilitated
by William Crookesıs experiments with vacuums and established by
Rontgen in l895), the identification of radio waves and the subsequent
invention of the wireless, of telegraphy, of the telephone, produced a fevered - and delighted - search to penetrate the unseen: the channels of communication
through the ether, presented themselves in
potentia as deliriously
numberless; they became intertwined with the physical possibility of moving objects
at a distance by finding some
vehicle analogous to radio waves. It was in the l890s, that the prefix tele-, used in so many
optical and other probes, was also
attached to tele-pathy, by the philosopher Frederic Myers, and to terms coined
by the Society for Psychical Research, of which he was a founder, such as
telekinesis.
Itıs
difficult from our hooked up, www vantage point today to imagine how
exciting,fascinating, and extreme seemed the possibilities that these
instruments opened up for their first users. The new media left the trace of
their passage: indeed their activity became legible only through such traces.
Radio waves could not be grasped by the human senses: only the effects of the
new methods of transmission , as the mark of a needle quivering on a drum as
the taps came through, as the translated and disincarnate voices from the radio
set. Visible verification
surrendered its hegemony to other
warranties of presence, sonic, and haptic. Material impressions of the new mediaıs
work were in high demand. In the absence of natural sensory means to verify the
principle at work , a dependence on second order technological proof of hidden energy arose, as in the
photograph or the X-ray plate. The extension of the word medium itself , in the
early l850s, to someone with paranormal powers, reveals the parallelism
perceived between the vehicle - the ether - and its products. The new technologies offered a model
for understanding that was extended to phenomena as yet beyond the reach of
scientific empiricism. William
James put his finger on the similarity of the scientific and spiritualist
experiments, as perceived at the time when he wrote that phenomena like automatic writing were
instruments of research, reagents like litmus paper or the galvanometer for
revealing what would otherwise be hidden.ı
Art
of the Unexplained
Tony
Oursler is one of several contemporary artists who have annexed the latest
instruments of global communications to explore the relationship between
individual consciousness and the noise of the universes and to see more deeply
into the convergence of
physics and experiences of
the psyche. Susan Hiller has been working this vein since the video
installation Belshazzarıs Feast of l983-4., which featured extraterrestrial and
paranormal whisperings and visitations reported by viewers as emanating from a
television set. More recently, with Wild Talents and Psi Girls she
has collected incidents of unexplained phenomena, of telekinesis, spontaneous
combustion, yogic flying from films dramatising special childrenı with powers,
such as . Fr
Witness, she set aside the thrillers and crawlers of supernatural fantasy for
another popular genre: true life stories of sightings, of UFOS and angels and other
phenomena. The comfortable snigger
of the skeptical mind was no longer any kind of appropriate response to Witness.
The piece left the visitor stranded among mysteries that raise fundamental
questions about the status of experience and human sense perception: the very
word, reality, begins to demand inverted commas, or, as in the Lacanian usage
of Slavoj Zizek, the Real becomes not only "Real," but means the very
opposite of its normal usage. The symbolic haunts the absence of meaning and
invests the fantastic with a new reality. Hillerıs chorus of testimonies to
weird and wonderful happenings and visions reported this "Reality" in
her witnessesı minds, and accorded it the seriousness and value of data
obtained through whatıs thought of as objective meansthe media of modern
communications. Nothing can be trusted;
or, anything and everything can be.
It
may even be becoming a trend: a
new devlopment of the surrealist interest in chance and imagination, in fantasy
and the poetics of reason not only of unreason. The art historian Roger Cardinal recently selected a show in
Paris, called Art Spirite Mediumique Visionnaire Messages dıOutre Monde, which
included several well-known Outsider Artists, such as Madge Gill and Raphael
Lomme, but also expanded to embrace channelers - painting with brushes made of cometıs hairı, as one
has expressed it in her
autobiography. The
performance artist Scanner has begun some psycho-geographical work catching ghost presences in city
streets. (check) There is also an
archive on line of Art After Deathı: which comprises interviews with artists
in the afterlife conducted by spirit mediums. The first CDs features The Countess of Castiglione. Yves Klein will speak next. The website
address is www.doublearchive.com .
This
interest of course relates to Spiritualist experiments of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries but it seems to be shedding its embarrassing
undertones to take its place as part of
the urgent need for the re-enchantment of the worldı. The interest of artists does
constitute a revival and a turn towards respectability of a fringe, crackpot
pursuit; this shift results, I feel, from the larger question with which
artists are engaging: who or what is a person?
Tony
Oursler is compelled by the twinned mysteries of consciousness and
communications technology; in taking the distinctive step of freeing the image
from the video monitor or sonic device,
he has truly magnified the eerie atmosphere that his cast of disembodied
messengers cast about them.
Indoor pieces, such as
Stone Blue (l995) and
Insomnia (1996) include
floating, distorted faces speechifying and rambling in Ourslerıs
characteristic post-Dada technobabble. They extend into a metaphysical
dimension the existential riddle
posed by cartoon characters, who exist only in picture-fleshı, walking talking
apparitions, possessing no referent in the actual world : as Jessica Rabbitıs
wife says in the film, Who Killed Roger Rabbit? Iım not bad, Iım just drawn
that way.ı, thus uttering as a
person from within a person who does not , indeed cannot, exist. The very irony
of the filmıs title draws attention
to the paradox: a cartoon character canıt be killed because a figment cannot be
alive. But cartoon animation
increases the weirdness of this state of living non-being: such figures are
representations of something that
could never have being, unlike say Hamlet or Ophelia.
Ourslerıs
work with dummies and automata and
projections realises the point where spooks and spectres coincide with the
phantoms of film, LEDS, and other digital means. A recent video work by Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe showed a video cartoon character
from a Japanese catalogue of off the shelf Manga materials, specially designed to join any kind of storyı.
She was offered for sale but failed to find a buyer who would fill her with
imaginary materialı in the Manga market: the artists bought her instead,
and in the artistsı video, she speaks of her failure to enter life as a figure of
entertainment; the piece is called No ghost just a shellı . By speaking the first person, annlee,
as she is called, comes into being, and is used to enunciate the paradoxical
non-being of the virtual person:
I am a productı she says. A product freed from the market place I was
supposed to fill, drop dead in a comic book. I will never forget, I had just a
name and an ID.ı
As
Donald Britton pointed out in one of the few trenchant essays on the
conventions of Disney fantasy, [This] cartoon reality convinces us to
perceive a character called Donald Duck as no more and no less a living,
functioning agent in the world he inhabits, than say, Sam Spade is in his. But
Sam Spade exists in a different relation to life than does Donald Duck. Sam
Spade is a representation of a biological human being who could be alive in our
world, or a world similar to our own, whereas Donald Duck could never be
biologically alive. Donald Duck is, for want of a better term, immortal;
having never been alive, he can never die.ı Analogously, whereas an eighteenth century automata mimicked
real life and inspires delight, wonder and fear through the disturbing
convincingness of its lifelikeness, Ourslerıs permutations of the effigyıs
possibilities produce their peculiar frisson because the conditions of life are
discarded, its norms exploded:
huge eyeballs disconnected from any body or person, weep and laugh, on their own, as if alive, limbless,
limp, tiny rag dolls blossom with huge speaking heads.
With
The Influence Machine, Tony Oursler has moved on from the historical
development of automata and audioanimatronics, to work another kind of
conjuring the illusion of life. In this installation, he revels in the
possibilities of another species of immortalı created by mechanical illusion:
the ghost. .
The
Influence Machine dramatises spirit visions and visits: Oursler draws on existing accounts of messages transmitted from
other worlds and departs from conventional orthodoxy about mind-body unity, and
space-time confines. In this outdoor urban phantasmagoria, the artist projected, onto trembling
foliage and interlaced branches, and high up onto the surrounding buildings of
an urban park/garden (Soho Square in London), looming, vast close-ups of
out-of-body messengers, men and women with stories to tell of wanderings in
other worlds. They describe out of
body states and encounters that defy conventional physics. Oursler projected, on one wall of the
square a huge fist rapping, as in
the first Spiritualist séances, in the l840s in Rochester, when the Fox sisters
reported ghosts knocking for admittance in a kind of performance of morse code. In the central garden/park, the
artist beamed up wraiths and mediums on to the trees and even on to smoke, so
that they dissolved and expanded, loomed and shrank, vaporised and materialised , in a sequence of hypnotic anamorphoses.
The
spectacle was inspired by the earliest Gothic popular entertainment, the phantasmagorias of the late eighteenth
century, invented in Paris by a brilliant, Belgian showman, Etienne-Gaspard
Robertson, who was born in 1763. Soon
after the Terror, in the same period when the waxworks Chamber of
Horrors were beginning to draw crowds as well, Robertson rented a convent to
stage his illusions and terrify the wits out of this public and thrill them
with delight at the same time: this was the new, mass entertainment of the age
of heavy industry and political bloodshed, and the apogee of romantic
individualism.
The
phantasmagoria, or commercial light show, first became a popular outing in
1799, and played to packed houses in Paris for six years; Robertsonıs colleague
and possible plagiarist Philidorı began his version in l801, and travelled
widely around Europe, including London and Edinburgh. In his engaging memoirs, Mémoires récréatifs, scientifiques et
anecdoctiques dıun physicien-aéronaute, published in Paris in l830, the great technical innovator,
Robertson, described his early
attempts to become a magician and conjure devils for real. After these failed,
he wrote: I finally adopted a very wise policy: since the devil refused to
communicate to me the science of creating prodigies, I would apply myself to
creating devils, and I would have only to wave my wand, to force all the
infernal cortège to be seen in the light. My habitation became a true Pandemonium.ı
He
made some brilliant technical innovations, and Oursler in all consciousness of
his legacy, has borrowed and
adapted many of them for The Influence Machine. Robertson invented two really
important things: he realised that
if you projected on to gauzes, and furthermore waxed the screen, you could
create a kind of luminous,
translucent look. He also
experimented with projecting
slides onto this newly shining screen, and discovered that if you blackout the
background, the illusion of a spectre floating of its own free will in the room
would become much more intense. He then, and this is in the 1790s in Paris,
rented the convent of the Capucines, of which of course the inmates had been
dispersed by the terror, and held his phantasmagoria, the pioneering
proto-cinema, in which skeletons, bleedings nuns and white ghosts walked.
Another
great innovation apart from the
blackening of the background of the screen and the surroundings of the figure,
and the luminescence of the screen was that he realised that if he put the
projector on rollers, he would be able to plunge towards the audience, which
would make the apparition loom suddenly much larger.
This
caused absolute pandaemonium at the time. When you do go to the square, youıll
see that Robertsonıs other great idea apart from the idea of pulling away the
projector was to project onto smoke.
One
of the marvellous effects in The
Influence Machine involves the
image appearing and speaking in smoke where it comes and goes, along the whole length of a beam. Thereıs
no loss of focus, so the phantom appears to hang in the air in different
places, all the time uttering one of Tony Ourslerıs collages of inner
hauntings.
Robertsonıs
show began with a speech: Citizens and gentlemen,ı he would declare, It is a
useful spectacle for a man to discover the bizarre effects of the imagination
when it combines force and disorder; I wish to speak of the terror which
shadows, symbols, spells, the occult works of magic inspireı He then ended
with a flourish, I have promised that I will raise the dead and I will raise
them.ı Teeming with devils,
ghosts, witches, succubi, skeletons, mad women in white, bleeding nuns and what
he termed ambulant phantomsı, Robertson s repertoire offers a vivid census of
the population deemed native to the imagination. He showed the shades of the
dead in the Underworld, the temptation of St Antony by alluring hoydens,
witches preparing for the Sabbath and flying off on broomsticks, while the moon
turned the colour of blood.
The
phantasmagoria, emerging in post-Revolutionary Paris, specialized in the terrors
of the sublime, according to contemporary taste; many Shakespearean scenes were
dramatized, possibly influenced by the prints in Boydellıs gallery. Banquoıs
ghost, and the three witches were summoned, alongside other figures evoked in
the work of contemporary artists like Henry Fuseli and William Blake: his
staging of The Dream or the Nightmare A Young woman dreams of fantastic
picturesı owes a clear debt to Fuseliıs famous painting, much disseminated in a
variety of prints. Robertson was a skilful and sensitive painter, as well, or
employed artists who could interpret his ideas. An image of the face of Danton,
recently beheaded by the guillotine, would float in the rising vapour above a
picture of his casket.
The
effect on the public of such spectacles was dramatic, and anticipates very
closely the excitement and panic that greeted the first screenings of films
proper, as in the famous case of the Lumière Brothersı advancing train.
Robertsonıs spectacular assaults on his suggestible audience can be gauged from
contemporaneous engravings: the phantoms loomed large and close, and swelled as
the projectionist suddenly pulled the projector back from the screen, or
manifested themselves wreathed in smoke and floating on clouds or even, as in
the case of Death with his scythe, appeared to lunge headfirst, scythe at the
ready, into the throng.
One
Londoner gave a lively account, in
the journal Portfolio ,
of The Red Woman of Berlinı, who was summoned at the climax of the
imitative show put on by Philidor
in l825. The rollers allowed the projectionist to move the image forward
towards the screen so that, growing suddenly larger, figures like the Bleeding
Nun, or Death, or the Red Woman would appear to rush at the spectators as if to
grab them : The effect was electrical, and scarcely not be imagined from the
effect of a written description. I was myself one of an audience during the
first week of its exhibition, when the hysterical scream of a few ladies in the
first seats of the pit induced a cry of "lightsı from their immediate
friends, which it not being possible instantly
to comply with, increased into
an universal panic, in which the male portion of the audience, who were
ludicrously the most vociferous, were actually commencing a scrambling rush to
reach the doors of the exit, when the operator, either not understanding the
meaning of the cry, or mistaking the temper and feeling of an English audience,
at this unlucky crisis once more dashed forward the Red Woman. The confusion was instantly at a height which
was alarming to the stoutest; the indiscriminate rush to the doors was
prevented only by the deplorable state of most of the ladies; the stage was
scaled by an adventurous few, the Red
Woman ıs sanctuary violated,
the unlucky operatorıs cavern of death profaned, and some of his machinery
overturned, before light restored order and something like an harmonious
understanding with the cause of alarm.ı
There
are two other spectacles that are connected, and developed around the same time
as Robertsonıs phantasmagoria. Itıs important that they occurred around the
time of the French Revolution
because it really did have an absolute material effect on what people were
imagining. Though itıs always hard for us, when weıre living inside our own
space and time to see whatıs affecting us, we can learn from what happened 200
years ago, how the turbulence and turmoil of the times leads and shapes what we
see as the uncanny and the terrifying.
The
two spectacles are the waxwork museum, which grew from funerary rituals
honouring and communicating with the dead through sacred funeral effigies of
them looking as if they were still alive.
Madame Tussaud of course came to England, very famously,
to set up her waxwork museum here, in the l820s, and she brought with
death masks she had cast in wax from the bodies of the dead as they fell under
the guillotine. The connection between the dead and the idea of the effigy was
crucial to the figuration of the undead.
The living ghosts of the waxwork museum and the phantasmagorias began to
circulate in Europe as entertainment. And they also coincide with Goyaıs great
sequence of fantasy images, the
Caprichos, which opens with the famous
engraving, The Dream of Reason
Produces Monsters (l797-9).
When
Goya began representing the
melancholy brooding of his own imagination, he crystallised a shift from
conceiving the imagination as an organ that processes external perceptions to
one that summons internal fantasies. The fantastic moves from a higher or
lower - supernatural world into a
world of personal visions. However impalpable or imponderable, divine beings,
angels and devils existed in the Christian order of creation, independently of
an individualıs imagination. The new rational view that optical phenomena were
natural, scientifically produced by human skill in interpretation or staging,
had the effect of situating the fantastic in a new, paradoxically modern and
wholly unstable habitation in the single mind of a person, in the imagination;
it becomes one with the subject or dreamer or melancholic or writer or artistıs
vision and it no longer reveals a true if shadowy world beyond this world.
The
opposition between fantasy and reason was gaping wider: no amount of scientific
demonstrations, analysing the character of physical phenomena, no amount of
special pleading by the showman conjuror who laid his art and its tricks before
the public, could heal the rift. The objects of fantasy became defined as
phantasmagoric, melancholy, terrifying, and at the same time pleasurable in the
thrills and shivers they excited; the mindıs eye could see in the dark, and its
natural habitation was consequently a low, nocturnal, gloomy place full of
ghosts and shades and emanations, the very opposite of the high illuminated
halls of reason. This opposition was carried on a spectacular contrast between
substance and shadow that the techniques of the phantasmagoria achieved as it
made immaterial, insubstantial figures appear vividly present and real; these
spectres corresponded as closely as could be instrumentally achieved to the
phantoms of the mindıs eye.
So, while impresarios like Robertson and
Madame Tussaud, were perfecting
brilliant, new technologies
to commemorate the departed and make
the dead visible again amongst us,
the spiritual system that had upheld beliefs in the independent and
external existence of ghosts,
inhabiting the afterlife, was being undermined. This is what Terry Castle, in
her entertaining book The
Female Thermometer (l995) ,argues: that the eighteenth century invented
the uncanny. The historic
Enlightenment internalization of the spectral she writes, the gradual
reinterpretation of ghosts and apparitions as hallucinations, or projections of
the mind introduced a new uncanniness into human consciousness itself.ı
Terrors
of the night, spectres and phantoms cease to be thought of as immortal souls of
people who are wandering around in hell, or purgatory, or perhaps even in
heaven, created by God. They are beginning to be understood, as Goya implies so
strongly, as fantasies in the head, what the writer on consciousness Antonio
Damasio calls the movie-in-the-brainı.
This is what was going on then and
Goyaıs sleeper, assaulted by demons, remains one of the most marvellous
succinct expressions of this turn towards inwardness. It illuminates communicates the state of being that explains
towards why such things still alarm us when we no longer
believe in the existence of devils. These fantasies have reality as things our
head does to us.
The
point of describing this historical shift here is that Tony Ourslerıs The
Influence Machine, created in the new millennium, derives from a
clinically paranoid, disturbed, fragmented concept of human personality. As in
its psychoanalytical origins, it
projects extreme and unusual cases of mental disturbance into the common arena of experience and
reads human personality in general in tis anamorphic shadow. The story Oursler
tells in The Influence Machine, and in numerous pieces that preceded it, is one
of romantic individuality decentred, evacuated and occupied, haunted and unhoused, the self multiplied and scattered, cellular memories rampant and
contradictorily on the loose inside the mind and body of a person, and he presents this story as generic
in our time: The Influence Machine was no less than a mise en scene of
contemporary existence, in his words, a psycho-landscape.
The
artist took his title from a machine invented in l706 by a student of Isaac Newton called
Francis Hauksbee, which consisted of a globe which spun, crackling and sparking
as it did so. But more particularly, the title echoes a celebrated article
by Victor Tausk, from
1918, delivered in Vienna, to the
Psychoanalytical Society about several patients diagnosed as
schizophrenic, who believed they were under the influence of some machine and
suffered from hallucinations, locutions, a despairing sense of losing control
of their own being: The schizophrenic influencing machine, writes Tausk, is a
machine of mystical nature. The patients are able to give only vague hints of
its construction. It consists of boxes, cranks, levers, wheels, buttons, wires,
battereies, and the like The main effects are It makes the patients see
pictures. .. It produces, as well as removes, thoughts and feelings by means of
waves or rays or mysterious forces In such cases, the machine is often called
a suggestion-apparatus.. The machine serves to persecute the patient and is
operated by enemiesı
The
cases Tausk described were among
the first of their kind to be analysed; the paper is a classic of
psychoanalytical literature alongside Daniel Paul Schreberıs Memoirs of My
Nervous Illness (1903) , in which a High Court judge from in Germany recalled his
mental agony, breakdowns and hospitalisation over a period of some twenty years at the turn of the
century. Scheberıs long, minutely detailed. Perfect simulacrum of a calmly
rational memory act, was cited enthusiastically by Freud, Jung and, more recently,
Gilles Deleuze, as the most remarkable personal testimony of derangement. Technologies which were then newly
developed reproduce some of the metaphysical manifestations of visionariesı and mysticsı experiences in the past. For instance,
Joan of Arc said at her trial that the voice comes in the lightı, while Schreber maintained that Apart
from normal human language there is also a kind of nerve-language that is to
say a human being causes his nerves to vibrate in my case, however my nerves
have been set in motion from without incessantly and without any respite.ı
The
stories of patients whose work was seen recently in the travelling show of the
Prinzhorn collection, also often
invokes new technologies X-rays, radio, telegraphy to account for
experiences of double or triple personality, of voices (locutions, in the theological
phrase) overheard that direct the
sufferer, of possession and trance.
Beyond the boundaries of mental disturbance, in established religious
practice, similar metaphors are also used to describe connections with
inspiration and the divine:
in Baptist ceremonies of glossolalia, otherwise known as speaking in
tongues, for instance, Godıs messages come down the heavenly telephoneı. But
the question of madness on the one hand, or spiritualist or other supernatural belief systems on the
other does not arise within the boundaries set by Ourslerıs work, because it
doesnıt make claims to represent something that the artist has experienced
exclusively, or to which he has some kind of special access: Oursler isnıt claiming
to be a magus. Heıs a child of the television age, and
television, his art implies, has become the influencing machine on all our
minds and it is also the new afterlife, where the past meets the future and
turns into an ever repeating, eternal present: Television archives store
millions of images of the dead, which wait to be broadcast...............to the
living....at this point, the dead come back to life to have an
influence............on the living...Television is, then, truly the spirit world
of our age. it preserves images of the dead which then can continue to haunt
us.......it also gives us the phenomenon of living ghosts, or stars as we like
to call them ı
When
Emily Dickinson writes, "one need not be a Chamber/ to be haunted" sheıs actually
positing after the Fox sisters and after the incredibly vital and
international movement of spiritualism, the idea that we are basically haunted
in our heads. The problem is and Tony Oursler works within this tradition
how do you visualise this haunting? Itıs all very well to say; "the
spectres are in our heads", what do they look like? If theyıre in our
head, what form do they take, this is the basic sort of artistic enterprise,
the basic poetic enterprise: how do we give them what Shakespeare calls a
local habitationı? What is the language of the invisible?
Some
consistent themes recur in visual and poetic metaphors that evoke spirit. One is insubstantialness and
vapourousness: the amorphousness of clouds, the shifting of phantoms in the light.The
rainbow for example provides one of the earliest images of soul : a diaphanous phenomenon, there, but not
there at the same time. When Dante meets the the shadows of the dead, he turns
to Virgil and he asks how is it that he can speak to them, when they have not
yet been reunited with their bodies?
How is it that he can see them at all? What are they? What is their
form? So Virgil explains the condition of the shade before the resurrection of
the flesh, following the implied metaphor of light and expanding it into a
phenomenological account of light's properties, as in a rainbow, as in fire:
e
come l'aere, quand'e ben piorno,
per
l'altrui raggio che 'n se si reflette,
di
diversi color diventa adorno;
cosi
l'aere vicin quivi si mette
in
quella forma che in lui suggella
virtualmente
l'alma che ristette;
e
simigliante poi alla fiammella
che
segue il foco la 'vunque si muta,
segue
lo spirto sua forma novella.
Pero
che quindi has poscia sua paruta
e
chiamata ombra...'
(Purg.
25, ll. 94-101)
('
and as the air, when it is full of rain, becomes adorned with various colours
through another's beams that are reflected in it, so the neighbouring air sets
itself into that form which the soul that stopped there stamps upon it by its
power, and then like the flame that follows the fire wherever its shifts, its
new form follows the spirit. Since it has by this its semblance henceforth, it
is called a shade...')
So
the metaphor of the rainbow, or the flame, light hanging in moving air was, that long ago - 700 years
ago- was already one of the ways
in which the idea of spirit or shade was visualised.
But
one of the things that happened with Spiritualism, to which Tony Ourslerıs work
also connects, is that, for the Spiritualists summoning a spectacle of the
realms beyond the apprehensible world was not sufficient. The sense of sight
did not satisfy; people wanted to hear the dead in some kind of material way
and they also wanted to hear and feel the presence of other life forms, dead
and undead.
Oursler
follows in this investigative tradition: he is a Seventies child, of television
and telephone and satellites and cable,
and the polyphonic aural universe fascinates him as deeply as visual
signals. He is listening in and collecting the evidence of the senses in the
altered conditions of consciousness that now obtain. He is registering and transmitting the noise inside the
brain and out : the crackling and sparking of consciousness, including the
individual unconscious alongside interstellar frequencies, with all the gibberish and
distortions, interference and
jumbled frequencies that past models of self have screened out. Here for instance are the words the
head projected onto the smoke
spoke in Soho Square: out of the
light
itıs
dark in here
come
out
come
out of the dark
you
can see me
you
can see right through me
I'm
not here
you
are not here
Then
again, later, the babble and mutterings turns to the imagery of computer
communication crossed with metaphors of illness that codify its functions. The
result achieves a sound poem that take the Dada nonsense tradition, in the
direction of psychological
portraiture:
you catch me like a virus from a sound from a bird from its voice through the
air from a bug caught inside, inside you, I can hide, let me hide, inside, Iıll
be quiet. Iıll be watching
you
catch me like a virus from the light through the lens through the eye through
the air POOF! I am no longer there
air
flare electromagnetic radiation shifting higher and higher
victims
of vexing vapors charge discharge empty thoughts wash windy flat wandering
light
sensitivity of the eye, visual purple ha ha ha itıs ok now purple come out
purple inside inside out
the
dark side
Ourslerıs
mimicry of séance ramblings
surpasses most of the originals that have been recorded; yet the effect is so
accomplished, so apparently authentic, and his collaboratorsı performance so
convincing that it was only when I read the transcripts that I realised he had
made them up, that he had created a collage of quotes and samplings and
historical data about the history of disembodiment. In his statement about The Influence Machine, he
observes: Telecommunication
systems such as the internet are the end product of a long drive towards the
current paradox of mind/body separation This paradox of the dis-corporative
impulse, the shedding of the physical body for the ethereal utopian virtual
presence and the promises of ultimate interconnectivity is at once linked to
the fear of the void, isolation, and
disassociative conditions. Today when the average person finds
themselves increasingly engaged with mimetic systems, as they move from
telephone to television to internet, and back again, the metaphor of the
uncanny technological equation between life and death is all the more
relevant.ı
Several
writers of fiction , starting in Victorian era and continuing today, propose a
form of personality which utterly breaks with the Judaeo-Christian compact of
body and soul in the idea of the person and works instead with the idea that
individuals can become possessed by someone else. In Spiritualism, they not
only become subject to a spirit controlı, but the spirit control might then
itself embody the ghosts of another person. So there are multiple layers of
personality that happen within the spiritualist séance, and which fed the
multiple personality definitions of quite recent psychology; Tony Oursler has long been fascinated
by Multiple Personality Disorder, not only as a clinical condition but a state
of consciousness that might be available to everyone through trance,
performance, inspiration.
Margaret
Atwoodıs compelling novel, Alias
Grace , is set against a
Spiritualist background in Canada and the United States, at the start of psychoanalysis there;
itıs the story of the most famous Canadian murderess, who was 16 in l863 when
she killed two people, and it proposes, highly convincingly through the sheer
narrative power of the writing, that she was actually led by the ghost of a
dead friend to avenge her and commit the crimes. Alias Grace ,
with its doubling title, depends on belief in spirit possession and multiple
personality seen through the lens of nineteenth century psychology.
The
second work of fiction that is remodelling the notion of the integrated self,
is the fantasy epic in three books called His
Dark Materials , by Philip
Pullman. Theyıre written for older children (though adults can certainly read
them and enjoy them) and they constitute a truly remarkable act of political
and moral imagination: they
feature magical instruments of knowledge, such as the alethiometer, a kind of
astrolabe which tells the truth, issues warnings and makes cryptic
prophecies. The second volume in
the triology is called The
Subtle Knife, and this tool is
again a new scientific medium of discovery, a knife which cuts through air and
opens a door into a parallel universe, which is actually existing at the same
time as the universe weıre in now.
In
one sense, this is of course what happens when you watch television youıre in
a parallel universe. Phillip
Pullman has simply transformed,
into a mystical and most enthralling physical adventure, the way we live
now, our co-existence with technological phantoms in virtual spaces, who have
been conjured by digital and other means. The phenomenon, unprecedented in
human existence, presents the most
profound and difficult philosophical conundrum of our times, unsettling long
established notions of reality and our relationship to it.
Tony
Ourslerıs work, which is using the new media and new concepts of physics and psychology, is continuing the
inquiries of a long and great tradition of natural magic. But there has been
another shift, since Robertson created the phantasmagoria in Paris in the
l790s: whereas he believed he was
throwing light, in the spirit of the new age, on the processes by which
superstitious credence in miracles and devils and spectres had duped people, the new spectres now
have regained their mystery, though it is of course no longer framed in
religious terms. And, as one of
Tony Ourslerıs apparitions says: It sure is dark out hereı